Right, so using LIKE '%%' is not a search query. It just matches a pattern. A search query will tokenize the word and search for that word instead.
This led me to wonder if it’s possible for the development team to add a feature that bypasses certain advanced search functionalities that require plugins, and instead directly performs a simple, direct database search.
This wouldn’t be the right solution because it would make search functionality vary from language to language making it inconsistent functionally and also from a performance aspect. You have to realize that searching leverages full text indexes which makes it fast. Without using them, the DB will have considerably higher load for no good reason.
Unfortunately, if you are using the DB for search, then installing the tokenizer is your only way. You can see here our documentation for similar languages without space: Chinese, Japanese and Korean search - Mattermost documentation. Alternatively, you can use our enterprise edition and use Elasticsearch, which has an in-built tokenizer for the Thai language.